Editorials
COMMONWEAL Labor & the limits of the market place There's a crude but widespread belief that human labor is just another form of merchandise, a species of raw material or energy to which...
...All this turmoil in employment—some people gaining, some people losing, with a high rate of joblessness at the bottom line—is commonly explained by the massive "restructuring" of the American economy...
...The labor market is marked by all sorts of special characteristics, and indeed it has never behaved the way that economic theories say it should...
...Lay-offs for ordinary workers are, of course, in the millions...
...A company that upgrades crude oil by refining it still controls the improved product...
...Repentance, conversion, reconciliation...
...The 1965 design and logo were his work, as are many of the graphics we regularly use...
...to celebrate the Unveiling of a bust of Rev...
...That doesn't mean that the new format emerged without a lot of thought, debate, hard work — and a trial run in the special supplement to the last issue in 1986...
...The typeface used for these initials, as for the logo and other standing heads, is Gill Ultra...
...Some of these workers may have gained flexibility...
...The details of each and every proposal will be important...
...Behind this hygienic term is a basic change...
...Unemployment, underpaid employment, insecure employment—these are not inevitable conditions...
...THE NEW LOOK For the first time since 1978 Commonweal has changed its look...
...Union power, concentrated in older industries and manufacturing regions, has eroded...
...Thus, with only amateurs like the Catholic bishops dissenting, the 7 percent unemployment rate has been declared natural...
...Thanks to inflation, the minimum wage's real value has dropped over 20 percent since 1980...
...Of necessity, Commonweal is printed on inexpensive paper stock, which can easily give the magazine a "gray" look...
...Yet Mayor Koch's gesture, controversial because of his past political statements and his use of the loaded term "lynching" to describe the case early on, was met with pronounced hostility at Our Lady of Grace Roman Catholic Church...
...are pitted against low-wage workers in Mexico or the Far East...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., the first black to be honored in the Capitol's Statuary Hall...
...Discrimination based on fear of crime, however understandable a projection of fear it may be, tends to exacerbate the separate scourge of racism which, in turn, discredits and undercuts efforts at crime prevention in a destructive spiral...
...A CAUSE FOR ALARM Last October, black dignitaries crowded the Russell Building in Washington D.C...
...Our new design employs striking rules and heavy initials to counter this tendency and give the pages touches of bold contrast...
...To escape the group Griffith crawled through a hole in a fence and onto the highway where he was struck by a car...
...and an increasing public awareness that the Reagan administration's record on handling affirmative action, its direction for the Civil Rights Commission, its lack of commitment to welfare reform and youth employment must be held to account...
...This episode presented the country with a sobering experience ofde'jd vu, a scandal suited more to the fifties than to the eighties...
...Whatever can't be explained or altered by their theories becomes "natural...
...is now entering the fifth year of an economic expansion...
...Zilch...
...Workers in the U.S...
...The magazine warns, however, that companies have no stake in upgrading the skills of such employees...
...Her words reveal a tragic lack of comprehension about the problem of racism and what is necessary to solve it...
...Even executives are caught in the maelstrom...
...In 1965 we explained that the new format "was designed to better express the contemporary nature of the ideas, issues, and events" the magazine brings to its readers...
...All is supposed to work out for the best in this competitive world...
...Sometimes racial prejudgments are founded upon ugly traces of reality — that young black males do in fact commit a disproportionately high share of crime, for example, ten times the robbery rate of whites...
...But the whole discussion will get nowhere unless it is supported by a fundamental recognition that both ethically and economically labor must be treated differently than the other factors in economic life...
...It is bad ethics because (a) human labor cannot be separated from the human laborers, who ought not to be treated like porkbellies, and (b) human labor is not just a means to an end but an end in itself, a way of being human...
...The new look arises purely from a spirit of playful4: Commonweal ness, an impulse to try something else, a desire to work within a different esthetic framework...
...A company that upgrades labor by training programs may not reap the benefits if the better trained workers thereby become all the more likely to take their new skills elsewhere...
...Out of each 100 such workers, 40 remained without employment despite the sharp economic upswing after 1982...
...The new Congress is certain to be a more hospitable environment for seeking and examining solutions, which will inevitably touch on measures like public works, early planning and intervention in plant closings, job retraining, employment search services, national standards for health and pension benefits, provision of child care, anti-discrimination efforts, and basic education...
...There are signs of hope: public outrage itself...
...Unemployment, however, will most likely not decrease but continue to hold at a level much higher than in any previous expansion—roughly 7 percent, or eight million people still in search of work and unable to find it...
...But each such case is cause for alarm...
...Standard expectations are for continued but mushy growth...
...And since most parttimers work for less than full-timers and often receive no retirement or health benefits, labor costs can be slashed still further...
...What has been the impact on teenage and black teenage unemployment...
...Or it can strengthen our resolve to check step by step racial hatred and the self-justifying rationale that is taught and learned by each generation...
...And taxpayers are asked to pick up the tab for benefits that have previously been part of the wage package...
...Result: demographic changes in the work force can explain little more than a quarter of the increased unemployment rate...
...The inflation and energy squeeze of the seventies, the shift to a service economy, the growth of a global economy, the waves of takeovers and sales—all have stripped away the buffers that once gave labor some exemption from the penalties of competition...
...This is bad ethics and bad economics...
...The U.S...
...6: Commonweal...
...And would that there were only one...
...Real wages have been stuck, and a majority of unionized firms are now trying to institute two-tiered wage scales, paying less to the newly hired...
...Yet to solve crime requires law enforcement and prevention through combined efforts at creating jobs, reconstructing families, inculcating particular values, breaking drug dependency, and offering youth serious opportunities to earn a decent future livelihood...
...Many of these workers were not young and transient but, according to the congressional report, were middle-aged "with long and stable job histories...
...Since labor constitutes the greatest cost in most production, this suggests quite a bit about the weakness of economic theories...
...From World War 11 on, much of American labor escaped the crude economics referred to earlier...
...Five days before Christmas, twenty-three-year-old Michael Griffith lay dead on Shore Parkway in Queens, New York after he and two other blacks, who had ventured into an unfamiliar neighborhood, were chased and beaten by a gang of local white youths wielding a baseball bat and tree limb...
...Minimum-wage laws have been undercut by inflation...
...Economists are as loose in their use of the word "natural" as are cereal manufacturers...
...King's nonviolent movement, the historical leadership of so many clergy in civil rights activities, and in Mayor Koch's appeals to both a black and a white congregation in Queens in the wake of the Griffith death...
...Now the same issue of Business Week that reported the Krashevski study notes that this thesis has been the object of an unplanned experiment...
...But law itself, though essential, cannot rid us of the pernicious beast of racism...
...legal authorities in the front ranks of those expressing society's intolerance of racial bias...
...Large numbers of managers find themselves shucked off as companies merge operations or shift their focus or strip off operations in order to pay for financial skirmishing: twenty thousand middle managers lost their jobs in 1985, most of them middle-aged, longtime employees...
...now it's only 38 percent...
...Aren't these precisely what the Mass is all about...
...He has worked in many media, from sculpture to film...
...The racially motivated harassment of one black student does not refute the progress that has been made toward racial equality after twenty years of civil rights legislation and public awareness...
...Due to the changing nature of the work force —the recent entry of less-skilled baby boomers, minority groups, and housewives —pushing unemployment below the 7 percent mark would be costly and provoke inflation...
...Needless to say, the situation has changed drastically...
...Disposable workers "keep payrolls lean and flexible in line with production flows," points out Business Week...
...But it doesn't...
...Antonucci is no stranger to Commonweal, however...
...The path to full employment is not obvious even though what are commonly taken to be barriers turn out to be something less...
...Unfortunately for this gospel-truth theory, a recent study by Richard S. Krashevski has calculated what would have happened if these supposedly less-skilled groups had remained no greater a portion of the labor force than in the lowunemployment 1960s...
...Their numbers have doubled since 1980...
...King envisioned appear like the slope of Sisyphus, with society destined ever to struggle toward an unachievable goal...
...for 18 of these, it was as though they had been docked a day's pay each week...
...His magazine work includes the design for Church, published by the National Pastoral Life Center...
...For the first time since 1965 we have redesigned the logo...
...While federal juries convicted nineteen former members of the Klan-like White Knights of Liberty and the leaders of the White Patriot Party, to cite just one recent example, the dispersed members of such groups are simply joining another organization with the same racist goals, the Christian Knights of the KKK, which held over sixty weekend rallies throughout the U.S...
...most are losing out in pay, benefits, and security...
...It spoiled whatever comfort one might take from the fact that in the fifties there were no black cadets at the Citadel, 16 January 1987: 5 while Nesmith was one of 116 black cadets among 1196...
...Firms sought competitive advantage by innovation, marketing, cost-cutting in materials or production—but generally not cutbacks in wages...
...Antonucci teaches at Parsons School of Design...
...This notion lay beneath Dr...
...Racial violence so blatant can make the climb to the mountaintop of the just society Dr...
...These employees may work for outside contractors, or do piecework at home, or involuntarily "fill in" part-time...
...in 1986...
...Add to them voluntary part-time workers, and the total equals approximately 25 percent of today's work force...
...A year ago, Congress produced a study of the 11.5 million workers who lost jobs between 1979 and 1984 when plants moved or closed...
...It is bad economics for pretty much the same reasons...
...He is the designer of the original logo and graphics for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, and is presently updating them...
...In 1978, we announced our change in a long editorial associating it with what we saw as a new phase in the life of post-Vatican II American Catholicism...
...The economic theories currently in favor have particularly stumbled in dealing with full employment, which the bishops call "the foundation of a just economy...
...Labor had to struggle fora greater share in the gains that came with increased productivity, but it could build rather 16 January 1987: 3 confidently on what had already been achieved...
...in many major industries a pattern was set that removed labor, at least relatively, from the harshest pressures of competition...
...The gains of the past were sometimes guaranteed by legislation setting minimum wages or other benefit standards, sometimes assured by countervailing trade union power...
...Of the 60 who found work, 27 did so at lower wages...
...No surprise: for women and minorities the figures were worse...
...It was designed by Eric Gill (1882-1940), English sculptor, wood engraver, typographer, and artisan-philosopher, some of whose writings appeared in Commonweal...
...The truth may be that only the deep and continuous process of repentance and conversion will ultimately lead to racial reconciliation...
...This has nothing to do with the Mass," one woman was reported as saying...
...Still, with more people entering the job market for whatever reason (and the need for more income, especially on the part of second wage earners in families, seems the most likely one), the number of new jobs has been insufficient to bring unemployment down to former levels...
...Since 1982 the economy has generated new jobs at a rate that rightly impresses Europe and Japan, although new jobs actually increased here even more during the economic upturn of the second half of the seventies...
...Along with the plight of displaced workers has arisen the existence of what Business Week recently called "disposable" employees: "To augment their cost-cutting —and in a few cases to neutralize unions—companies have started creating pools of 'contingent' workers to replace regular employees working traditional 40-hour weeks...
...That same month, at The Citadel, a venerable military college in South Carolina, seventeenyear-old Kevin Nesmith was awakened by the obscene shouts of five white classmates dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen...
...Another popular belief among economists is that the minimum wage is so high as to discourage the hiring of teenagers and especially black teenagers...
...COMMONWEAL Labor & the limits of the market place There's a crude but widespread belief that human labor is just another form of merchandise, a species of raw material or energy to which the marketplace's laws of supply and demand must apply exactly as they do to iron ore, electricity, and artichokes...
...It also used to equal about half of the average production wage...
...a black police commissioner and black attorneys involved in the Queens case...
...Givebacks"and lockouts have become a regular part of labor-management contention...
...The design was created by Emil Antonucci only after much consultation with the editors about Commonweal's resources, schedule, special production needs, and the distinctive "feel" of each section of the magazine...
...We've changed our design for the same reason that people once decorated their shields and today keep seeking new shapes for skyscrapers, for the same reason that people periodically shift their furniture or alter the frames of their eyeglasses...
...They left a burning newspaper cross in his room...
...Well, we have no such highfalutin claims to make this time around...
...The fact that you can't separate the work from the worker means that what makes obvious sense when applied to raw materials may have a very different impact when applied to labor...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 1
